So to the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Having kept this blog for four years and a daily journal at home for over thirty, I am late coming to this diary of diaries (Modern Library, ed). It has been worth the wait.
Pepys was a high official, not a nobleman, within the upper-workings of the administration of Charles II during the 1660s. He commutes to work every day and rubs shoulders with people from all walks of life; cabbies and alehouse owners, to kings, lords, and charlatans. Through it all he manages to record, with an amazing display of recall, events both personal and profound. He exhibits his own foibles, pettiness, and excesses before us along with his eyewitness accounts of hangings, plagues, and politics.
It is the glimpses of 17th century life that we read between the lines, however, that brings the times to life; how he treats his wife, morals and street-life, meals, fashion, and rhetoric. The days are dotted with tidbits: he pans the performance of Romeo and Juliet, he has his first taste of tea, and he memorizes the multiplication tables and learns about the hemp rope trade to better execute his job in the Navy offices.
Yet at the same time, the differences of the times seem smaller than the similarities. His faults and hopes are our faults and hopes while the integrity and indulgences of his peers persist through the ages. At its core it is his zest for living and his appreciation, at every instant, for all that passes for life on the planet that endears him to many and to me.
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